The sound of music that struck the collective ears of the world arose from a surprising source. It came from the orchestra composed of children playing instruments recycled from trash at a dump in Cateura, Paraguay. The Landfill Harmonic came into being when an environmental engineer with a musical background saw a need to help the children playing in the landfill while their parents worked at gathering salable scraps of trash. Some of the children worked with their parents searching through the piles of garbage. Others were simply there, abandoned to their own devices.

Mr. Chavez began to teach them music lessons. One of the garbage pickers, Nicolas, joined him in making instruments out of materials from the landfill - tin oil cans, forks, bottle caps, hair brushes, anything that could be found. For seven years the experiment was unheard of. Then social media brought the harmony to the Internet. The children proclaimed, “The world sends us garbage. We send back music.”

More than trash was recycled; the children of the dump were too. Here again I am drawn to Wes Stafford’s book,Too Small to Ignore. Wes contends that children are too important and too intensely loved by God to be left behind. He details his childhood spent in two places: the West African village where his parents served as missionaries and the boarding school where he faced years of silently borne abuse. About the first place he noted, “In Nielle, poor as it was, the little village banded together to keep poverty out of the spirits of its children.” About the other early life experience he stated, “I simply chose to turn it for good.”

Throughout God’s Word there are more than two thousand passages that declare His love for the impoverished and He requires His followers to defend their cause.

“And whosoever shall receive one such little child in My name receiveth Me. But whosoever shall offend one of these little ones who believe in Me, it werebetter for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he weredrowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:5-6 KJV